‘Ant-Man’ Director Peyton Reed Reveals Alternate Ending

It’s not surprising that Ant-Man originally had a different ending, given how much footage is shot for each Marvel film, with the studio often mandating longer production schedules to ensure they have room to change things if needed. As detailed by director Peyton Reed, the Ant-Man alternate ending wasn’t that much different from the one we ended up getting, but it did tie up one particular loose end.

At the end of Ant-Man, you may have noticed that Martin Donovan’s Mitchell Carson was conspicuously absent. Mitchell took off with the Cross particle after revealing that he had been secretly working for Hydra all these years. And while Scott Lang was busy defeating Darren Cross, Mitchell vanished and never returned.

In an interview with CinemaBlend, Reed says the original ending featured a showdown between Scott and Mitchell:

At the end of the movie [Carson] gets away and has these Cross particles, and there was a sequence where Ant-Man has an encounter with him. But then for a couple reasons, it felt like maybe we should leave those particles out there. In that original thing, he took Martin Donovan out and got the particles.

That definitely leaves the door open for those particles to come back into play in the MCU. Removing the sequence hardly seems coincidental — just about every little thing in the MCU is there for a reason. So it’s likely that we could see Mitchell return sometime during Phase 3, and those particles may cause trouble for our heroes down the line.